Zach · FPS Designer

Yes, so you'll have noticed how it's now in the PU, I believe. We've done some balancing, and the health has, well, there's been tweaking of the overall combat experience at the minute. That is essentially step one of the further work we're doing. So the new AI has gone in, and you take more shots than you did previously. And if you're in PvP, you currently take more shots than you did previously. And this is an overall step forward to the balance that we talked about in the Life in First Person talk, where we want to increase the TTK and make an experience which is fair and engaging in both PvE and PvP environments. Because obviously there's been a lot of talk of frustration of, Star Citizen's a lot of prep work, right? Before you fly down to a planet, before you fly down to a bunker, then if you just walk out your ship and there's a guy hiding in a corner with an assault rifle and he beams you down, you've lost all that time. It doesn't feel overall fair. So we've done some changes and we're going to continue working on them. This is the literal first iteration that has gone in, and it's something we'll be iterating patch to patch, receiving feedback: this feels too long, this feels too short, this is unfair. Even tying into the injuries as well, right? Anyone who's done a lot of bunkers will have noticed they're getting a lot more injuries now, for example. So obviously we take the point of realism, bring it back to fun, right? So the cost offset of increased health is that you get more injuries. So you are not punished, but for engaging, there is a consequence. And the consequence isn't death. Now it's basically injuries, the medical system, medical gameplay, giving that more purpose, life, breath, death.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I was going to say, because any work on time to kill has to naturally include work on medical gameplay. You can't do those in a silo.

Zach · FPS Designer

Yeah, I mean, it's a barrel of fish, right? It's one of those things where we don't just go in and tweak a number. We have to think of all the other cascading consequences and effects of all those things. But overall, the feedback has been quite positive. I've been annoying some Twitch streamers, I've been annoying people on Reddit saying, how do you feel about that? How's that going? Reading Spectrum and just getting an overall idea of what people think about it, how they feel about the current direction. Because it's a very contentious issue when people talk about health, because it's always one of those things where, in gameplay, it's such a big thing that everyone has preferences as well, which obviously plays into it. And it's one of those things where we take a wide variety of feedback, and we want to get somewhere where we can land that the community's happy, everyone's happy, and it plays really good.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And this is so much more than just health. Health is just one aspect of this overall time to kill. Shields, health, armor, injury, medical gameplay, all these things.

Zach · FPS Designer

And yeah, we're obviously all very conscious of that. And we're giving it to you now, and then you can give us feedback. And I think that's a good direction for us.